Pot, cookies and girls

Sarah Eckrich
Opinion Editor
seckrich@lhup.edu

February 27, 2014

When recreational marijuana passed the vote in Colorado a little over a year ago, I was pleased. Colorado’s citizens made a progressive and beneficial decision. And I’m all about marijuana taxes helping to fund education. Get high for higher ed.—poetic, don’t ya think?

But I’m not here to plead the case for pot. It passed and everyone who doesn’t like it has to deal with it. What is far more interesting are the various ways people have capitalized on cannabis. You don’t have to sell pot to profit. Turns out, you just have to attract the stoners.

And what is one thing all stoners love? Food.

Traditionally, munchies are always snacky, junky, simple foods, and yet no stoner wants to actually get up and go somewhere for munchies. This has partially been addressed by delivery services, which are only open really late when there are drunks and stoners to serve.

But now that marijuana is legal, businesses can cater to ganja users outside of their homes. The most clever among them aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, they’re trying to rebrand and remarket preexisting products, products that may not have previously been strongly linked to cannabis culture.

My favorite so far is girl scout cookies and the girl scout moms who have elected to sell them outside of dispensaries with their daughters. While the viral story of it happening in Colorado turned out to be false, it’s a happy reality in other parts of the country, where medical marijuana has been legal for years.

But not everyone recognizes the genius of this idea. Some parents think it’s dangerous, which is just stupid. If you let your kids watch TV, they’ve seen worse than anything preeminent in pot culture. Standing outside a marijuana dispensary is, at worst like watching a Cheech and Chong movie. And if that’s enough to screw up your kids, something else went wrong long before they saw some stoners making bad jokes.

Besides, it’s not like patients leaving dispensaries are using their medicine right outside the place. Do you leave the pharmacy and start taking your antibiotics in the parking lot? No. Most of these little girls don’t even know where they’re at, just that they have to sell cookies–again.

Woe for them, because girl scout cookies are now, always have been and forever will be wonderful. People will always want to buy them, especially stoners. Imagine knowing that you’re going to go home and smoke and get the munchies.

Then you leave the pot shop and bam—glorious girl scout cookies. You’d be buying up two of every cookie for the great munchies flood and your cookie arc.

Even those not tempted by munchies alone have incentive. Some dispensaries offer deals where you could, for example buy a certain quantity of marijuana and get a free box of cookies. People buy more weed and little girls get to sell cookies to hippies. Win-win-win situation.

If you can show me where someone is being harmed in this situation, I’d love to chat. As it stands, marijuana is now teaching little girls how to be entrepreneurs, searching for new ways to serve a market that’s still young and growing. When I was a girl scout, we never sold anywhere half as fun, not to mention half as lucrative.

Those little hustlers in pigtails and canvas sashes and vests can now be affixed to the marijuana market. I, for one, am giddy as a girl scout.